[TriEmbed] Raspberry Pi perspectives

[Rodney Radford]

Personally I think the closed GPU on the Raspberry Pi gets a bad rap. Yes,
the GPU is closed source (nothing the Raspberry Pi guys can do about that
as it is not their choice),.

It is true that it is responsible for mounting the SD card and starting up
Linux, but the way I look at is that it takes the place of the BIOS and
bootloader on a standard PC system. Like the BIOS, it opens up the boot
device (SD card), loads the bootloader. The main difference is the
bootloader is also part of the GPU code so it does make it more difficult
porting other systems to it, but not impossible.

After that, the code runs on the Linux side of things with it being in
control with the GPU handling graphics, as expected, and monitoring
voltages and temperatures, with the ability to directly write to the
display for battery and heat issues.

You can modify the Linux code and you can create custom device drivers for
it, so I don't see it as a closed system any more than a PC is running
Linux with a 'closed' BIOS.



On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 11:12 AM jonathan hunsberger via TriEmbed <
triembed at triembed.org> wrote:

> Maybe not a lot of fully open options in the "sbc running Linux" category
> yet, but..
> BeagleV recently released on RISC-V.  At $150 it's not really a RPi
> replacement, but could lead to proliferation of similar solutions at lower
> cost.
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 1:10 AM Mauricio Tavares via TriEmbed <
> triembed at triembed.org> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Dec 27, 2020 at 10:17 AM Pete Soper via TriEmbed
>> <triembed at triembed.org> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > Here are some criticisms of RPI that this list will hopefully take as
>> constructive. Some good tech details that many of us may have been unaware
>> of.
>> >
>> > https://ownyourbits.com/2019/02/02/whats-wrong-with-the-raspberry-pi/
>> >
>>       I was not aware of the everything-goes-through-gpu-blob aspect
>> of the Rpi4. What are the alternatives? I was looking at the Rock Pi,
>> especially the N10 for some applications, and then started wondering
>> if it has as much closed source stuff as the Rbpi.
>>
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